News-Feeds:
Support your local developer!
One of the strengths of TYPO3 is its extension framework and we all have our favorite extensions. But have you thought about voting for their developers?
A representation of TYPO3's extension framework :-) (actually a sculpture by Jean Tinguely)
TYPO3 has an excellent framework for developing extensions. I'm sure things could be improved (they always can!), but compared to many other open source projects installing and uninstalling extensions in TYPO3 is dead simple and mostly safe.
The result is that there are quite a few extensions out there (we're nearing 3000) which is great. One drawback is that it's often difficult to find the right tool because of this very abundance. A rating system can help in this case. A long time ago there was the idea of a review process that would give a general quality rating to an extension. This failed because there were far more extensions than reviewers and only a couple of extensions ever got rated.
More recently, when the TYPO3 Extension Repository was overhauled, a voting system was introduced. It was not to everyone's taste, but it was thought that it would at least make it more simple for people to express their opinion than a formal review process.
Unfortunately this is failing too: people are simply not voting, or at least not enough. Me included so let me cast the first stone at myself. When thinking about it I can't come up with any good reason for not doing it, except the usual "I don't have time now, I'll do it later." Which is rather lame, isn't it? Having reached that conclusion I went on a voting spree yesterday and rated the extensions that I use and appreciate most.
I think it is a very important thing to do. Most of the time we contact extension developers only when we find a bug. We do take this opportunity to thank them for their work, of course, but we just never send those thanks spontaneously (if you do, well, great!). Apart from that there's the download count which shows that some people do use your extension. If you are in harmony with the spirit of sharing you don't absolutely need thanks to keep you going, but receiving some still does good and motivates you to further share your stuff.
So do a good deed today and vote for your favorite extensions!
comments
Fabian
February 5, 2008
18:01
February 5, 2008
20:47
February 6, 2008
09:21
But what's realy missing is a filtering function. I don't care much about the votings, because I can not filter for them.
It would be great if there would be a advanced search on typo3.org with the following functions:
keyword:[input]
category:[select]
state:[select]
author:[select]
must have manual:[x]
last time updated:[date]
first upload:[date]
dependency:[input]
[search button]
I look on the following things in exampl:
1.) Last Update
2.) Documentation
3.) Author
4.) Dependencies
...
Sometimes I also search just by the author, because some authors just do good extensions.
February 11, 2008
01:30
Indeed. I followed your suggestion and rated many extensions. What I think we need is that authors delete obsolete extension (or mark obselete). There are way too many extensions, and there quite alot which are outdated big time. Will help and improve the user usebility of the TER repository for extensions.
Cheers,
Darko
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